The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  Next came the line that Shahzad would remember all his life. “If something happens to you, Shahzad, I will die,” Diana told him. Shahzad had never felt so lucky.

  And that same season, as if she was a kind of talisman, an unexpected opportunity arrived in the form of a baby.

  A cousin of Shahzad’s who worked with him lost his wife in childbirth. She had gone back to her native village to deliver her baby, and the rural doctors botched her Cesarean section. The mother died, but the baby survived.

  Shahzad’s extended family shouted at his cousin after the death, just as they had shouted at Shahzad when his uncle died. “How could you send her home? The doctors are not good there,” they said. A more pressing question was also passed among them: “Who will look after the new baby?”

  “I will,” Shahzad said.

  He had already begged Sabeena for permission, saying the Quran’s warning did not apply, because the boy was related by blood. Even Shahzad’s father could not complain.

  “Bas, bas, let’s take him,” Sabeena said at last, worn down by Shahzad’s persuasions. She was also worried about the future of the baby. After all, it is a newborn child.

  Together, Shahzad and Sabeena went down to meet his cousin and see the child. They both thought he looked perfect. As they sat with the baby, the cousin’s father quizzed Shahzad about his business. But Shahzad did not give the right answers. The old man didn’t like how little money Shahzad had in the bank, because Shahzad had spent so much of it on doctors. And he found it troubling that Shahzad planned to leave the cold storage business soon.

  For the next forty days and nights, Shahzad and Sabeena did not get an answer about the baby. It was a mourning period, and decisions could not be made. But Shahzad was certain the baby would be theirs. Men whose wives died did not raise children on their own. Soon I will be a father, Shahzad thought, and could barely wrap his mind around the thought.

  But then the circumstances changed. The family agreed that the sister of the dead wife could marry Shahzad’s cousin, a common fix in their community when women died early. Together, they would take care of the child. Shahzad and Sabeena were told their help was not needed.

  Diana had not been a good luck charm after all.

  Despondent, Shahzad addressed Allah as he knelt down on his prayer mat. Everybody has a child. Why not me? he prayed. Give me a child also. Just one. I’ll be very thankful. All of my brothers are having a child. I am the only lonely person.

  Please.

  In the weeks that followed, Shahzad grew impatient to see Diana, who seemed to never visit his shop anymore. He needed her energy to offset the disappointment of the lost baby. He forced himself to listen to Sabeena, who told him once again that he couldn’t force a child. “Each man’s fate is written,” she told him, with the same fatalism their Hindu neighbors sometimes employed. It said so in the Quran, verse 57, sura 22: “No misfortune can happen on earth or in your souls but is recorded in a decree before We bring it into existence.”

  This didn’t make Shahzad feel better. He wanted a world in which circumstances could be changed and tragic events undone. And he knew that in the new Mumbai, men could make their own fates, and families did not have to dictate lives. He kept thinking of how his father, who rarely spoke anymore, continued to rule his fate with his silence.

  Shahzad tried to comfort himself by thinking of Dilip Kumar, the actor known for tragic roles who played the prince in Mughal-e-Azam. Kumar never had a child in real life. Shahzad wondered if even the manliest of actors suffered from a low sperm count just like him. No, Shahzad decided, it must have been a choice. The choice of a broken heart, because Kumar had fallen in love with his costar Madhubala, and Madhubala’s father, like the king in Mughal-e-Azam, had forbidden their love affair. Years after the film came out, as her father continued to keep her from Kumar, Madhubala grew very sick. At thirty-six, she died from a hole in her heart. And though Kumar later married, he never had any children.

  Shahzad marveled at how life mirrored films and films mirrored life. Except that he and Sabeena did not have an epic love affair. He did not know if they had ever been in love. He didn’t think he even knew what that was. He had stronger feelings for Diana, the kind of feelings he’d seen in the movies. A phrase kept coming into his mind about him and Sabeena: shaadi barbadi. A ruined marriage. Without a child, he didn’t think it could be anything else.

  Sabeena did not think of their marriage as ruined. But she had learned that she had to live for others, not herself. Shahzad’s mother lived to take care of Shahzad’s father, and Sabeena lived to care for Shahzad and his mother. What is inside a woman dies when she marries, Sabeena thought. We have to sacrifice our wants and our feelings, from morning until night.

  And: Sometimes you find happiness, other times not. When she told Shahzad this, he felt ashamed. He would hang his head and say, “My family is like this—what can I do?”

  Sabeena remembered back to when she was a child, which felt like many moons ago. She remembered how she would laugh all the time with her father, making masti and telling jokes. Lightheartedness didn’t seem part of her personality anymore. Life went ahead anyway.

  She still thought about what her father had said about Kashmir: Madhubala, anywhere you want to go, you can go in a marriage. But that was silly. Trips required money. Kashmir was for the movies. And Shahzad’s family was so conservative that she rarely left the house.

  At the beginning, life and marriage had seemed limitless, stretched ahead like the shimmering line of the sea. She and Shahzad went on trips. They spent money as if it would not end. They did lots of favors for each other. It was a very good, very beautiful life, she thought. But now the wave had come crashing down. Her mother-in-law, with her increasing demands, Shahzad so busy and stressed, and then the medical test that had determined their future and possibly made her husband go mad. Since then, they rarely did favors for each other.

  But if she drew a line back from every problem in their marriage, she saw that it almost always pointed at Shahzad’s father. Privately, she had begun calling him “the Dictator.” Shahzad’s mother—young and beautiful and full of promise—had been weighed down by the Dictator’s madness, and now she sought to weigh others down. Shahzad had been scarred in childhood by the Dictator’s words, and in adulthood by his silence; now he was mangling their marriage too. The question of adoption, though entangled with their faith, was really made impossible by the Dictator, who lived his life by the old, harder ways. How far could one man’s hurt travel?

  Sometimes, Sabeena wished that the Dictator would die.

  * * *

  By the next winter, Shahzad had left the cold storage business. His hands were losing circulation. His arms shook just pulling a chicken out of the case. Though he bought a hair dryer to blow hot air on his hands after removing a chicken, especially in the cold, it did not help much. Still, he did not want to leave Byculla Market altogether, which would mean leaving Diana.

  And so Shahzad began selling live chickens in the market. His father leased him a narrow, enclosed walkway in the middle of the bazaar, which Shahzad quickly realized was the wrong space in which to raise a bird. Perhaps his father had known that. There was almost no ventilation in the passage. The chickens began to die before Shahzad could sell them, collapsing from heat exhaustion and then suffocating from lack of air.

  Shahzad decided it was time he made his own contacts in Byculla Market. Many Muslim men in the area were builders, and he soon found his way into real estate. Ever since the economy had opened up a decade ago, Mumbai held the promise of limitless jobs. It was one of the largest cities in the world, and getting larger, as more and more people moved in—thousands every day. And so real estate was a booming business. As a real estate broker, Shahzad could also do what he did best: win people over with his honesty and good nature. No one distrusted the earnest broker in the ill-fitting clothes.

  But though he and Diana still saw each other around the market, sh
e had recently stopped speaking to him. It started after Shahzad saw Diana’s husband with another woman and had run straight to Diana’s workplace to tell her. He burst into her office and breathlessly delivered the news, even though her secretary was in the room.

  Later, Diana admonished him: “Why would you tell me that in my office in front of other people?”

  Ever since, Shahzad had been looking for a way to patch things up. He knew Diana lived in a small, one-bedroom kitchen apartment, even though she earned good money and could afford better. He was sure he could find her a nicer flat. And he thought he knew just the neighborhood: at Mira Road, a far-north suburb with mangroves by the sea. After much persuasion, Diana agreed to take a look.

  The day Shahzad showed Diana the flat at Mira Road was one of the happiest of his life. There was a wide creek, tall, marshy grass, and a clear view of the sea. On the suburb’s coastlines, the mangroves’ roots stretched into the water. The flat, though still under construction, promised to be huge, and Diana loved it. They came back downtown very late at night. This day was just like a picnic, Shahzad thought.

  But the picnic ended after that. In Shahzad’s memory, Diana gave him money to book the flat, somewhere between one and two lakhs. The following month, work on the building was canceled. Construction was like this in Mumbai: pakaa one day and canceled the next, due to a building collapse, the industry’s rampant corruption, or a builder caught skirting the rules. Diana was furious with him. Shahzad tried to reassure her, telling her about another flat by the same builder near the city’s naval dockyard. If she went with the same builder, he promised she wouldn’t lose a rupee. But Diana’s husband did not want to live there; now that he’d seen it, he wanted Mira Road. And at the dockyard, the property cost more. This time, Diana would have to take out a loan, which she did, because otherwise she would lose the money she’d put down.

  After the paperwork was done, Shahzad called her to check in, as he often did, but Diana did not want to talk with him. “Now you don’t call me,” Diana said. “Kya?” Shahzad asked, certain he must have misheard. “Shahzad, you’re a broker. I’ll give you your 1 percent, but then it’s over.”

  Shahzad grew angry. The usual brokerage fee was 2 percent. He had done so much for her, and now she was not only ungrateful but also trying to cheat him. He felt as if he’d been used. “You give me 2 percent, that’s what everyone is giving,” he said, his voice rising.

  In the end Diana gave him 1 percent, and after that did not answer his calls.

  Instead, on the day of her move, which was just before Christmas, Shahzad watched from afar as she carried her baggage to a taxi; Diana’s old apartment was just across from Byculla Market. Distraught, Shahzad could not do any work. A builder friend patted him on the back, saying, “Why are you worried? You’ll get many other girls.” But Shahzad did not want other girls. He wanted Diana and her million-dollar smile.

  Shahzad continued to try to call her after that. Again and again he dialed her number, which he had memorized. Then he started showing up outside her work, at the café she went to for coffee, and in the restaurant where she ate lunch. If Diana saw him, she ignored him, perhaps growing disturbed at how often he was popping up. Shahzad knew he was stalking her but couldn’t help himself. He had seen men chase women like this in the movies. Eventually, the woman always gave in. No really meant yes, or keep trying. After many, many calls, Diana picked up, perhaps afraid of what would happen if she didn’t.

  “Whatever is there, let’s forget it and just become friends,” Shahzad said in a rush.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  After Diana moved, Shahzad felt his world had grown dark. He realized that she had used him to advance her son and to get a nice flat. Even Bakri Eid, the “festival of the sacrifice”—for the cutting of the goat, cow, sheep, buffalo, or camel—one of Shahzad’s favorite holidays, did not cheer him up.

  For several days around the holiday Shahzad felt sick, weighed down by work and daily life. He didn’t take any meetings or show his clients flats. When Shahzad’s brother asked him to go visit their grandfather’s native place to arrange some paperwork for the family property, Shahzad begrudgingly agreed. The village was a forty-minute boat ride away or a rocky three-hour drive in heavy traffic. He couldn’t stand the thought of getting on a boat feeling as he did, and so he took the three-hour taxi. As they drove past the winding ghats near hilly Panvel, he felt even worse than before. At first, he assumed it was just nausea from the car ride or his depression over Diana. But, passing Panvel, Shahzad had a sudden sinking feeling that something was not right. It was a feeling he couldn’t shake even after he arrived at the village. He completed the paperwork and returned home anxiously to bed.

  Several weeks later, Shahzad was at the train station when his cell phone rang. The call was from an old childhood friend, who used to go on the Sunday drives to Chowpatty. “See the headlines,” his friend said.

  Shahzad ran outside the station to buy a paper. There, on the front page, was the headline: a karate champion in Mumbai was dead.

  Atif.

  Shahzad came home crying. His best friend. His strong friend. His braver and better-than-he friend. His only true friend, if he was being honest with himself. The clients and builders and shopkeepers and Diana—they were all friends because they wanted something. Atif had never asked anything of Shahzad. He had only given, never taken.

  “It’s God’s will, O,” Sabeena told him. She wanted to comfort Shahzad but did not understand how it was already Atif’s time. Atif was still young, not yet forty.

  The next day, Shahzad went to see Atif’s parents. In Shahzad’s memory, this was the story they told him: Atif had a niece, a Muslim like him, who fell in love with a Hindu boy. The girl and boy ran away. Atif, the strongman of the family, was asked to find a way to stop the marriage and went to the police station to ask for help. Several officers followed him in jeeps to track down the girl. But when they reached the boy’s house, the girl already had a red tika on her forehead, which was worn by married Hindu women. Atif called his wife and said, “She’s married. It’s too late.”

  Shahzad found it strange that Atif would have agreed to help prevent an interfaith marriage, which were only becoming more common in the city. After all, Atif himself had run away with a Jain. But his family told Shahzad that the boy was uneducated and the girl was underage. Under those circumstances, Atif must have found it his duty.

  It’s too late. Those were Atif’s last words. After that, the police put the boy in the passenger seat of one of their jeeps to take him to the station, while Atif sat in the back with the constable. The girl was placed in a second jeep. Atif’s family’s hypothesis was that the boy was afraid, because the girl was underage, and he could be put away in jail for many years. As they drove past a tree, the boy reached across the driver and grabbed the wheel, turning it toward the tree. Perhaps his plan was to make a break for it. But the jeep spun out of control, tumbling down a hill, into a ghat outside Panvel. The boy emerged with only a fracture. Atif and the constable were dead.

  Atif’s family told Shahzad they believed there had been a conspiracy. Why was the boy sitting in front? Who puts a criminal in the front and the constable in the back? It didn’t make any sense.

  Atif’s death appeared in the paper late, because of Bakri Eid. During the festival, a time of celebration, the family held the news. But Shahzad realized now, looking back at the date of the accident, that it was the very day he’d passed the Panvel ghats with a sinking feeling. He thought he must have somehow sensed that his best friend was dying nearby.

  The family told Shahzad that as Atif tumbled into the ghat, he’d been doing namaaz. Shahzad cried harder at this. Of course he was praying. Atif had always been a better man than he.

  * * *

  After this, when problems arose at home or with Sabeena’s family, Shahzad sought to prove himself as worthy a man as Atif. He wanted to be known as a man who cou
ld be called upon in times of crisis to fix problems.

  Shahzad found his moment after Sabeena’s brother, who was known to be hot-tempered, married a girl who kept a lover, and there was an incident on their first night of sex. It was not clear whether Sabeena’s brother had been rough with her, or if she had refused sex because of her lover, or whether something else happened altogether. But the rumors flew. People gossiped that Sabeena’s brother was gay, which was a black mark in their community. They whispered that because of this he could not perform.

  Shahzad went to Sabeena’s brother. “Didn’t you break the seal?” he asked. He said he had. Shahzad told others in the community that Shahzad’s brother had performed, and wasn’t gay, but the rumors persisted. Shahzad had the idea to take him to a fertility clinic. The doctor measured Sabeena’s brother’s sperm count, which was very high. Shahzad couldn’t help but feel jealous. Wow, he thought. God has shown me this report I wanted to see for myself for so long.

  “Now no one can talk badly against you,” Shahzad told him. He called Sabeena to tell her the good news. “He can be strong now,” he said, and he was right. The community accepted the report as evidence her brother was straight, and Sabeena felt proud of her husband.

  But within a week, the girl asked for a divorce. The decision was up to Sabeena’s brother and the community, because Muslims had their own laws that governed marriage and divorce—laws that had been in place even before Partition. Efforts to create a uniform civil code in the country had been unsuccessful; each time, the government was accused of violating religious freedom. And so it was Sabeena’s brother and the community that granted the divorce, claiming extreme circumstances had warranted it. Even the Prophet had said divorce was an occasionally necessary evil. The girl was blamed, while Sabeena’s brother was considered an innocent divorcé.